Intelligence

Lawrence of Arabia takes on the Taliban-News-World-TimesOnline

Inspired by the legendary leader, key Washington adviser David Kilcullen tells Christina Lamb how he is reshaping strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq

Source: Lawrence of Arabia takes on the Taliban-News-World-TimesOnline

As Nato’s biggest offensive against the Taliban gets under way in Helmand, many of the 4,500 soldiers involved will be recalling the words of an 11-page e-mail that has circulated like wildfire among those fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“You watched Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers, and know this will be the most difficult challenge of your life,” it starts. “But how does [all the theory] translate into action at night, with the GPS down, the media criticising you, the locals complaining in a language you don’t understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people?”

Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency is written by David Kilcullen, a 40-year-old Australian social scientist who is trying to redefine America’s war on terror. It is based on TE Lawrence’s Twenty-Seven Articles, a guide for British officers working with Arabs during the first world war.

Despite being Australian — he remains a reserve lieutenant-colonel in the Australian army — and an anthropologist, Kilcullen is the chief strategist on counterterrorism in the US State Department. He was given the job advising secretary of state Condoleezza Rice 18 months ago after writing an influential paper that said Iraq and Afghanistan should not be treated as a terrorism problem but as a globalised insurgency.

“My fundamental argument was that counterterrorism is enemy-centric — try to destroy the terrorists then the problem goes away,” he says. “That’s clearly not the case. Even if we kill Bin Laden, that’s not going to resolve the conflict. The problem is a quiescent population which is preyed on by a hostile element, so instead of going after that, you should go and protect the population and try to win their allegiance.”

It is a view taking hold both in Washington and London. More than five years after September 11, the US military is coming to accept that “shock and awe” is not the answer in theatres such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Troops are now issued with a counterinsurgency field manual, the first to be released by the American military since Vietnam.

Counterinsurgency has been made a key part of the curriculum on the Armor Captains’ Career Course for young US officers. In Whitehall, too, suddenly everyone in the Foreign Office Afghan group is talking about “coin”, shorthand for counterinsurgency.

So influential is Kilcullen’s thinking that he has also been appointed as chief adviser on counterinsurgency to General David Petraeus, the new US commander in Iraq. He will head a group of so-called warrior-intellectuals whose thinking was once regarded as subversive but who are now charged with finding the best way out of Baghdad. “A patient on intensive care,” is how Kilcullen describes Iraq, “not lost yet but . . .”

Kilcullen’s views were developed largely in East Timor, where he commanded an infantry company in the United Nations intervention force during the struggle for independence, and in Indonesia where he studied Islamic extremism for his doctorate.

When he was just 12, his father — a philosophy professor — gave him a copy of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he has carried ever since. “It’s fairly battered now!” he laughs. “I do believe we can learn a great deal from him.”

Another unconventional source is the cult 1999 film Fight Club starring Brad Pitt about alienated young white men in America going through the process of radicalisation, creating an ideology and forming terror cells. At the end they carry out a widespread terrorist attack.

“If you show a film about Islamic terrorism to people who are not Muslim, all they will see is the Islam and they will conflate the two,” he explains. “You’ve got to show people the phenomenon in its natural condition in their own society.”

Last month Kilcullen was in London, advising on how to take on the Taliban. He pulls no punches over the difficulties that British troops are facing. “I work in Iraq and various other theatres in the war on terror and have seen the enemy up close and I can tell you this enemy we face in Afghanistan is the toughest we face anywhere,” he said.

His 28 principles start with “diagnose the problem”. He explains: “The hardest thing in counterinsurgency is to know what’s going on. It’s not like world war two where you just look at a map and see Hitler’s forces are there and the allies are here.”

The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, who launched the Nato offensive last week, preempting an expected Taliban spring strike, seems to have followed another of his principles — “seek early victories to stamp your dominance”.

Perhaps most important is “know your turf”. Kilcullen is critical of senior European officers who believe that gratitude for reconstruction will bring people over to their side. “It’s a very naive Hollywood view of counterinsurgency that you go in, speak the language, be nice to them and they’ll like you,” he said.

“People will be grateful for what you’ve done but when the enemy turn up with weapons and threaten them they will slide back to the enemy side. In Afghanistan the population don’t exercise choice individually, it’s collectively. You win or lose this place a village or valley at a time.”

According to Kilcullen, after more than five years in Afghanistan, the US military now understands that. “If you watch the way American forces operate, the first thing they do before they even deploy a soldier is engage with the local population and talk to their leaders. A lot of American operations now are planned by sitting down with the provincial governor, the military and police chief and local villagers. That would have been unimaginable back in 2001.”

He gives the example of a US commander in Kandahar who talked to villagers for weeks before carrying out a military operation. “He had prepositioned tailored aid packages designed to meet specific requests,” he says. “Within a few hours of the firing finishing that package was rolling so villagers could see an immediate benefit to cooperating.

“That pattern didn’t emerge by accident. America, unlike European countries, has rotated its troops back to the same areas each time so you have people operating in Afghanistan who have done two or three stints in the same place. They know the villages, know the valleys, know the people and know what not to do from mistakes made last time.”

That is not his only criticism of Europe. Referring to last year’s high casualty rate in which more than 4,000 Afghans were killed, he says: “The Europeans have been making a lot heavier use of air power than the Americans. Most people killed by American troops — which is relatively low compared with the Europeans — have been killed in direct rifle fire, in one-on-one engagement where people are actively shooting at the Americans and they’ll take them out, so there’s a pretty high chance they are killing the right people.”

He is keen to dispel comparisons with Vietnam, pointing out that the Taliban are all from Pashtun tribes. “The potential appeal of the Vietcong was unlimited. All Vietnamese could see something for them in the Vietcong agenda. But that’s just not the case with Taliban. The Pashtun population of Afghanistan is between 23% and 40% at most.

“Even in the worst-case scenario of Talibanistan to the south and east, Afghanistan would not fall. It has a whole area north of the Hindu Kush which would be viable as a state; Kabul would still be viable as capital.

“That’s not to say that things are rosy but that the fundamentals of the Afghan state are very sound compared with other insurgencies,” he says. “Look at the approval ratings of the Afghan government — still more than 50%. Tony Blair would be very happy to get that.”

March 11, 2007 at 10:21 AM in Middle East, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home